How you speak, move, and behave on camera can impact student engagement. Tone, style, and speed are important. As is eye contact and gesturing. A sense of movement can increase learner attention.
Over and over again in the research you will find the recommendation to use a personal, relaxed, and conversational tone in videos. Students learn better from and are more engaged with instructors who have a more conversational tone than a formal one and a friendly, relaxed style (Mayer, 2014). Students appreciate instructors who tell stories and use humor (Hibbert, 2014; Oakley, Poole, & Nestor, 2016). And while your initial impulse might be to slow down while talking on camera, Guo and colleagues (2014) show that students tend to be more engaged when instructors speak fairly quickly and with enthusiasm. Remember, students can always slow the video down, pause, or rewind. How many times have you watched videos at 1.5x when the speaker was speaking too slow?
Making eye contact with the camera can create connections with students and lead to better outcomes (Fiorella, Stull, Kuhlmann, & Mayer, 2019). But it can also be distracting (van Wemeskerken, Ravensbergen, & van Gog, 2018). When conducting a demonstration or walking students through a problem, it can be important to gaze and gesture in the direction of what you want students to focus on (Ouwehand, van Gog, & Paas, 2015), or stay off camera entirely.
When on camera, if you have a more sophisticated filming and editing set up, consider cutting between close up views of your shoulders and above and views that show more of your body. This sense of movement can increase attention and can allow your hands and gestures to be seen, which can improve learning (Oakley, Poole, & Nestor, 2016). But be judicious with these cuts, as they can raise attention when used carefully, but be distracting when overused (Reeves & Nass, 1996).
Overall, you want to be natural and relaxed. Be yourself! If cuts and gesturing and speaking quickly makes you overly self aware and awkward, don’t do it. Your students aren’t expecting a perfect robot, they will learn best from a relatable human being.
Fiorella, L., Stull, A. T., Kuhlmann, S., & Mayer, R. E. (2019). Instructor presence in video lectures: The role of dynamic drawings, eye contact, and instructor visibility. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(7), 1162–1171. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000325
Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos. Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference (L@S ’14). https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566239
Hibbert, M. (2014, April 7). What makes an online instructional video compelling? EDUCAUSE Review. Retrieved April 18, 2020, from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/what-makes-online-instructional-video-compelling
Mayer, R. E. (2014). Computer games for learning: An evidence-based approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Oakley, B. A., Poole, D., & Nestor, M. (2016). Creating a sticky MOOC. Online Learning, 20(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v20i1.731
Ouwehand, K., van Gog, T., & Paas, F. (2015). Designing effective video-based modeling examples using gaze and gesture cues. Educational Technology & Society, 18(4), 78–88. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.18.4.78
Reeves, B., & Nass, C. I. (1996). The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
van Wermeskerken, M., Ravensbergen, S., & van Gog, T. (2018). Effects of instructor presence in video modeling examples on attention and learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 89, 430 – 438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.038